LATHAM -- The production that just wrapped at Curtain Call Theatre told one of many variants on the story of Dracula -- an age-old legend that turns on a visceral, but ancient, horror.

The production that opens this weekend, Melanie Marnich's drama "These Shining Lives," has a superficial resemblance in this respect; it starts out, to paraphrase a character in the play, feeling like a fairy tale and becomes a tragic horror of a decidedly more modern, but no less visceral, kind.

Along the way, it is, at times, a love story and an inspirational tale about women finally moving into the workplace at a critical time in American history -- and fighting to right a wrong that befalls them there, said the production's director, Cindy Brizzell-Bates

It's an account of a true story of a corporation that put women to work at a skilled trade but exposed them to an unanticipated environmental hazard and refused to acknowledge the tragic error until forced to do so by the very women victimized by it.

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"It's such a beautiful story, a heartbreaking story," said Bates, a veteran of several previous Curtain Call productions. "It's also a challenge in the way Melanie Marnich chooses to tell it, in little snapshots, a series of small scenes that gradually build into the full story."

Yet another in Curtain Call's string of regional premieres in recent seasons, "Shining Lives," is an example of the theater's propensity for reaching far afield, from well-known, classic or strictly New York-born fare for programming.

"As soon as you read the story, you feel like you're sharing an important story with your audience," Bates said. "We need to know about this."

The play tells the story of women who went to work for the Radium Clock Company in the 1920s and 1930s, hired for an intricate task: painting glow-in-the-dark radium on the faces and hands of wristwatches. It depicts their sense of dignity at entering the labor force, the support and compromises of their families and their pride in their accomplishments.

At the time, the risk of using this radioactive material in close-at-hand work was not well understood. Indeed, radium even had an undeserved reputation for healthful properties. As a growing number of the factory women fell ill with what would turn out to be radiation poisoning, their employers initially turned a blind eye to their plight, until a number of the affected women joined in a class-action lawsuit.

By play's end, the women win something of a pyrrhic victory in their fight for recognition of their plight.

"I started at Curtain Call in 2005, and I've stayed there primarily because of the mix of plays they present," Bates said. "I find it rewarding to work at a theater where we have the opportunity to tell stories that really need to be told, like this one."